In November 2017, I was invited to deliver a talk about Sonic Borderspaces at Emory University, besides the activities involved in my visit, what remained in my memory was the University Hospital – one of the top research institutions devoted to the eradication of Ebola – and the construction sounds and noises coming from a building across the street, where a group of Spanish-speaking workers carried out their jobs. I was walking with a couple of graduate students and I couldn’t help to comment that we were witnessing a sonic borderspace. On the one hand, a complete silence emanated from the University Hospital, while, on the other, the mix of dissonant and cacophonic sounds produced by the construction workers set an invisible biopolitical border that could metonymically be compared to Trump’s Wall on the US-Mexico border, for north of the border there’s the scientific infrastructure to combat diseases such as Ebola, while south of the border there’s a scientific dependency (paraphrasing Theotonio dos Santos dependency theory) that echoes throughout the Latin American continent as a shout for equal access to biopolitical development without the mediation of financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund.
Over the decade that I taught at American universities, I used to fly between the US and Mexico on a regular basis, often with the research purpose of tracing the pathways of those working communities labeled as subaltern. My students, and even some colleagues, were always surprised when I told them that Mexico was also a republic, and as such its political organization was similar to the United States. Comments such as “I didn’t know that the Third World had republics as well” or “I thought Mexico had only dictators” were common responses. However, a closer look to the social dynamics and the division of labor of places such as Mexico City – which based on the numbers and statistics is usually catalogued as a Global City – would challenge the efficiency of the constitutional republicanism that has ruled over the Mexican people since the 19th century.
When I began my doctoral studies, my research interests focused on decolonial theory, subaltern studies, and the so-called “long nineteenth century,” for that reason I developed the critical compulsion of noticing colonial practices everywhere I went. Nevertheless, through my continuous travelling between Europe, Northern Africa, Latin America, and the US, Mexico always stood up as a place where colonialism lingered in the most quotidian habits and practices of the working and disempowered classes, which in Mexico compose most of the population. I do not want to make an exhaustive compilation of such habits and practices, but a close look at the distribution of the health services and the traditional channels to access fresh foods would provide enough evidence to claim that over the last decades Mexico has experienced an intense process of re-colonization that has jurisdictionally crystalized with the election in 2018 of the first left-wing president in modern Mexican history. One would imagine that the election of a self-called socialist president was going to bring structural and institutional changes that would create the means to empower those communities linked to agrarian social spaces. Instead, one of the most noticeable measures enacted by the new administration – which at first glance seemed harmless – consisted in changing the titles of the public servants and the administrative jurisdictions. For a scholar like me who didn’t live in Mexico and didn’t experience the transition from the soft-dictatorship of the PRI to the presidential election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico seemed to remain intact in its core, but a closer look at those nominal changes would render the fact that the new titles were those which in turn were used during colonial times.
Worldwide the media coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic, in regards of political figures, has focused on the role of Donald Trump, who has been criticized for not listening to his advisors to find more effective and inclusive strategies to fight the pandemic. In Mexico, Lopez Obrador has been also criticized for ignoring, for instance, the guidelines suggested by the World Health Organization and for getting closer to criminal groups linked to drug trafficking, all while the pandemic is deepening social inequalities and public hospitals are at their full capacity or simply don’t have the resources to take care of the Covid-19 patients. On both sides of the border, Mexican farmers (campesinos) are among the most vulnerable communities; due to their working conditions, diet, exposure to pesticides, and the medical attention they receive. Coronavirus spreads among them at higher rates. The Columbian Exchange brought deadly diseases to the Americas, mostly in detriment of indigenous peoples. Today, I suggest that the Coronavirus Exchange, while it has impacted the health of the global population, as it advances is producing its worst effects among indigenous communities, who historically have been placed in disadvantaged biopolitical situations.
The Coronavirus pandemic has also brought to the surface an aspect of global racism that had passed unchallenged until recent times: DNA. Medical research has historically focused on developing vaccines and medications based on white subjects. Diabetes, for instance, is one of the global diseases that – while it affects people from all ethnicities – has become endemic among non-white people, thus suggesting that both colonialism and coloniality are also practices at the genomic level. As 2020 progresses, the entire world keeps awaiting the arrival of the one vaccine that will defeat Covid-19, a vaccine – or better put, a set of vaccines – that is being developed in laboratories of the First World serving the interests of those who will be able to afford it. The bid of the US government to buy such vaccine for the exclusive use of the American people seemed not only outrageous, but it also made evident what was already clear for any biopolitical analyst, which is that the Coronavirus pandemic is only the tip of the iceberg of a genomic war that at first glance is confronting China against the US, both economic superpowers battling for the financial control of the world. The role of both the Developing World and the Third World in this global war is somewhat unclear, some may argue that this genomic war is vanishing the World System divisions in order to pitch people against one another based on their ethnicity, unleashing not only a clash of civilizations – paraphrasing Samuel P. Huntington’s controversial book – but a biological crisis that will displace the most disadvantaged communities to the very margins of civilization. Mexico, a nation known over the last decade mostly for having the second highest rate of feminicides (only after Brazil)[1] and a political culture linked to drug cartels, is now among the nations with the highest rates of Coronavirus deaths.
All the attempts to display a “new normality” have failed in Mexico for various reasons. Mexico’s structural dependency in terms of both logistics and health-related information has been poorly administered by the nation’s leaders. At the street level, Mexican people attempt to keep carrying out their surviving endeavors, some wearing the sanitary facemask and using a hand sanitizer that has been banned in the US due to its high methanol content. However, with food prices rising and drug cartels displaying unprecedented forms of violence allover the country, Mexico’s exit to the pandemic seems like a chimera. In the meantime, Mexico’s most vulnerable keep awaiting that the world’s superpowers give them the magical vaccine – as if Coronavirus was affecting only the Mexican nation -, while politicians regardless of their ideological affiliation seem more invested in joining the forces of institutional corruption. Contemporary Mexico seems like a neocolonial puzzle where re-colonization practices are beginning to vanish the spiritual humanity that used to characterize Mexican people, who are surrendering to both lockdown anxiety and the violent imagination – emerging from drug cartels – that pop culture and media reified on daily basis. Lopez Obrador will be traveling soon to Washington D.C. to meet Donald Trump. On the surface the purpose of the meeting is to discuss matters regarding the new trade agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the US (‘USMCA’ in the US, ‘CUSMA’ in Canada, and ‘T-MEC’ in Mexico), but what most Mexican citizens want to hear when Lopez Obrador comes back from north of the border is that there’s a way out of this pandemic, as if the US owned the secret to defeat Coronavirus, while scientific research keeps showing that Latinx and Black communities are the ones at higher risk in the global genomic war that is dictating the biopolitical pace of 2020.
[1] https://oig.cepal.org/en/indicators/femicide-or-feminicide
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It is a very good analysis of professor Crank on what is happening in Mexico. Congratulations.